Whenever a Rails exception occurs, it spits out a backtrace full of filenames and line numbers. I’ve often thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just click on one of those and it would take me to the problem?” Well, it is nice—and you can use this new plugin with TextMate too, if you’d like.

The textmate_backtracer plugin (download) will make each of the backtrace lines clickable in your browser. I’ve tested this with FireFox and Safari. It’s not a debugger, but it makes life easier :)

To install, just download to your rails app’s ‘plugins’ folder and untar/unzip it. Then restart your server (webrick or Lighty). Enjoy!

Update: I’ve fixed a couple of things in the latest download—there was some debug info being written to STDERR (now removed), and backtrace lines without a method were not clickable (now clickable).